


Phantasms and Illusions

by arcaneGash



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-01
Updated: 2014-03-01
Packaged: 2018-01-14 04:10:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1252258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcaneGash/pseuds/arcaneGash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As a god, you feel you should have nothing to fear. The task of creating a universe is in your hands. What else is there to be afraid of? But you’re absolutely paralyzed, helpless...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> based on a personal experience  
> yeah so this is something i've had written down for a long time focusing on nightmares and stuff  
> it's still not really shippy but there's better stuff coming eventually  
> rose's point of view in the first chapter, kanaya's is in the second

Your eyes open into almost total darkness. It takes only a few seconds for you to make out the various objects in the room and remember that you were fast asleep only a few seconds ago. You try to grunt and roll over, but neither happens. It takes you another few moments of drowsy, slow comprehension to realize that you’re frozen completely. You try to wiggle your fingers, move your toes, even shift your tongue a little in your mouth, but you can’t move.  
Sleep paralysis? you wonder to yourself. You’ve never had this happen before. Nightmares come and go, and often much of your time asleep is spent in dream bubbles, but this was never something you expected to experience.   
Too late you realize you’ve closed your eyes again. You pry them open, using all of your energy, and you stand up, slowly and clumsily. You can see now, as if there is a dim light from an unknown source. You stand facing the other side of the bed, where your alien girlfriend lies asleep. Your gaze lingers on her for a moment before recognizing with a jolt that there’s something facing her, looming over her like a predator. It’s you.  
And in that same instant you realize it isn’t you, it can’t be. The imposter drags its gaze upward from Kanaya’s face into your eyes, and you can’t look away, again you’re frozen entirely. Its face is wrong and horrible and everything a human face should not be; its eyes are enormous and dark, you're not sure if it has a nose, its hair is matted and tangled. It appears more as if it is a demented caricature of you. As if it’s reading your thoughts, a small grin appears on its face, and that grin expands quickly, displaying razor sharp teeth, spreading like a disease literally from ear to ear. And it not once moves its black, soulless eyes from you.  
As a god, you feel you should have nothing to fear. The task of creating a universe is in your hands. What else is there to be afraid of? But you’re absolutely paralyzed, helpless, and the terror is surging through your system, starting in the pit of your stomach and shooting upward until it’s pouring freely out of your mouth and eyes and nose and everywhere else it can find an escape. And you scream.  
You don’t stop screaming for a very long time. You don’t know why you do. Maybe it was in the hope that it would awaken Kanaya, and she would rip the hideous thing apart with her trusty chainsaw. Maybe someone else would hear and come to your rescue. Maybe it was to wake yourself up. But whatever the reason, you scream, and nothing happens. Kanaya doesn’t even twitch, the door to your room remains tightly shut, and the thing is still leering hungrily at you, grinding its teeth together. You beg yourself to stop, you’re acting completely irrational and unlike yourself, but the thing must have you in a trance, because you’re screaming and no matter what you can’t stop.   
The thing has still not moved since it first looked up at you. But as you watch, transfixed, one of its eyelids lazily closes and opens again. The damned thing winked at you.  
And in the next moment the shadows close in on you. The dark tentacles writhe and slither, grappling and squeezing and choking you and even managing to drown out your own screams with their garbled, indecipherable speech. The room fades out of view as you sink lower and lower into the tangled mess of black.

You awaken with a hard jerk. You’re in the same position as when you woke up the first time, and to your panic, your back is to where the thing was before. And you still can’t fucking move.  
You try to force yourself to calm down. You choose a finger on your left hand and try to wiggle it. Nothing happens. Again you try, and you begin chanting a mantra in your head. Move. Move. Move, god damn it, move!  
You catch yourself being eternally thankful when you realize you can, in fact, wiggle your finger a little bit. You try again, and this time all your fingers move. Then your hand, your arm, your shoulder, and by then you’ve flipped yourself over, staring directly where the thing had been before. It’s gone.  
Of course it’s gone, you admonish yourself. You simply suffered from a hallucination, and those are common, if not expected, during sleep paralysis. That was all it was.   
But the ordeal has shaken you, you finally admit to yourself. You’re unnecessarily anxious, and before you know what you’re doing, you’re shaking Kanaya awake.  
She rolls over, blinking hard. You don’t even wait for her to focus before you bury yourself in her, throwing her arms around you and clinging to her for dear life. You can tell she’s baffled but not unwelcoming, and she holds you closely before asking gently, “Rose?”  
You don’t answer because you don’t trust your vocal cords yet. Hesitantly, she continues, “Are you all right?”  
“Nightmare,” you answer curtly, buried in her chest. You don’t want to explain the details just yet. She says nothing but rests her chin on the top of your head, waiting for you to provide.  
It takes a few minutes of preparing before you finally explain what happened, giving every single detail you can recall. But it doesn’t take too long, and by the time you’re finished, she’s holding you closer still somehow, and her slender fingers are tracing patterns on your back in the way she knows you adore.  
Abruptly, you realize your face is wet, and though you curse yourself for it, you don’t try to hide. She knows and she understands. She waits until you’re calmer to speak.  
“Sleep paralysis,” she repeats, and the way she rolls the alien term around in her mouth makes it seem pleasant, more inviting. “To my knowledge, trolls do not have an equivalent to such a phenomenon. Humans are quite strange.”  
You agree emphatically. “It’s a fascinating thing, really. If a little unnerving.”  
Despite your choice of words, she knows you were more frightened than you let on, mostly by your complete helplessness and lack of control. Because she knows, and because she cares, she holds you until you finally slip into a fortunately dreamless sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> kanaya's turn

Nightmares appear to be common for everyone on the meteor. The humans have it just as badly as the trolls—between Rose’s involvement with the horrorterrors and Dave dreaming about being cast into an ocean of lava over and over and John regularly battling Jack and watching his dearly beloved father die, it is a surprise that humans do not have an equivalent to sopor slime. You admire them all for being able to rise from their beds in the morning, shaking off the dream’s persistent cling, and smile at each other over their cups of coffee. Because when you suffer a nightmare, you cannot pretend that it does not bother you.  
Your dreams often involve rapid, disjointed memories of before and during the game; in snippets, you remember fighting for your life against the Alternian wildlife, and you remember softly whimpering into your lusus’s nurturing touch, and even her soothing hums would take a long time to relax you. More frequent than your flashbacks to your early sweeps were the reminders of the game you and your friends thought, egotistically, you could win. You watched the hope of your entire race be disintegrated in a single second. You watched your friends die, one by one, beaten and stabbed and, worst of all, shot straight through the chest.  
And that was the most frequent, and by far the worst, recurring nightmare you had. Your own death and your subsequent undeath.  
You remember vividly the shock you initially felt when Eridan waved his mediocre wand and blasted you right through the abdomen. It felt at first like you had been bludgeoned, and then the burning began. The shooting, fiery pain spread through your being in a path like a spiderweb. You felt your life gushing out of the perfectly circular hole in your body, at first like a fountain, then in weakening, dying spurts. And that was when you at last slipped into the void. The entire ordeal could not have taken more than a few short moments, but in your sleep you relived it over and over until you felt as if you had experienced your death for longer than you had been alive.  
And your return was not much better. The pain still lingered tenaciously, not nearly as strong, but as a constant reminder of what you had been through, and the memory of it hurt almost as much. You ‘borrowed’ Eridan’s awful cape and tied it around yourself, naively hoping it would blanket the tiny stabs that kept coming from the empty hole. Similarly, you borrowed some of Feferi’s remaining blood, hoping to quench the sudden, consuming thirst that felt as if it were boring a hole where your organs formerly were. You even recall thinking “She Will Not Need It Anymore,” and at the time feeling no remorse, none at all. Later you would have plenty of time to reflect on your rather sociopathic actions, but introspection at that point had not been on your mind at all.   
What was on your mind, however, were two simple words: “Blood” and “Revenge.”  
You still have not the slightest idea how you managed it, but you had sneaked up on Terezi and ‘borrowed’ a small amount of her life as well. Apparently even when Starving Vengeful Rainbow Drinker Kanaya was completely in control, you had a little more respect for the living than the dead; not only did you not suck her dry, you bandaged her afterward.   
By then the growling emptiness in the back of your mind allowed itself to fade just a little bit, which gave center stage to the demands of revenge.  
You remember it all clearly. You charged in, interrupting a showdown that you realized later would have done nothing but make things worse. A well-placed kick sent Gamzee soaring over the edge of a cliff, his gruesome trophies taken directly from the corpses of your friends also leaving his possession, to your slight relief. Then you had turned on Vriska, the troll you had desperately tailed for sweeps, the troll you smothered your own feelings for, the troll who had broken your heart so many times you had stopped counting long ago. You clocked her square in the face. You watched her glasses careen away, you felt her jaw crack as your knuckles connected with it, you watched her slump to the ground in a daze, and you felt triumphant for the first time in far too long.  
Eridan was next. Your actions were automatic. This is what he deserved for eliminating the future of your entire race. You did not feel your fingers reaching for your lipstick. You did not feel the weight of it in your hands when it became a revving, roaring chainsaw. You did not feel your arms moving when you swung your weapon toward him, easily severing him in half. You did feel his blood splash you, coating your face and your chainsaw. You did feel yourself converting your chainsaw back into your lipstick. You did feel Equius’s cracked sunglasses falling cleanly onto your face as you applied your purple-stained lipstick. You had never felt so satisfied. No wonder Vriska had swooned at the carnage.  
You would catch images of Eridan’s face as you ripped through him in your dreams. You would hear your chainsaw, you would hear the crunch of your knuckles against Vriska’s face, you would hear Gamzee’s “honk” as it faded into the distance. You would remember your grubhood and the blood and death it brought with it. All of these sensations usually grew in volume and frequency until they become a deafening whirlwind of sights and sounds and scents and you would awaken, throwing a hand over your mouth to muffle the scream, trembling violently and clutching at the bedsheets like you were two sweeps old.  
Though Rose was not even an arm’s length away, you never bothered her with your nightmares. You stood up carefully, thankful she was a deep sleeper, and leave the room until you could compose yourself enough to return to bed. Often this would mean busying yourself with your sewing machine and materials, trying to absorb yourself in your work, which usually succeeded and resulted in Rose discovering you hours later, worrying about you. “I could not sleep and I decided to advance my projects further in the hope that it would exhaust me,” you explain.  
Other times you would find a room free of anyone else, sink weakly into a corner, and cry until you felt you would drown in your own tears. Then you would drag yourself back to bed, but would be too anxious about falling asleep to actually do so until your emotionally exhausted mind quit on you. You would awaken hours later, disoriented and irritable, to a fretful Rose who pretended that she was not as concerned as you knew she was.  
Most nights were simple and easy. But you would not let anyone discover the truth


End file.
